


Salim's Next 5 Wishes

by yujacheong



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Character Development, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Wishes, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:32:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujacheong/pseuds/yujacheong
Summary: 5wishes the ifrit grants Salim+1wish he does not.“I do not grant wishes,” the ifrit replies.“But you do.”And he did. And he does. In the miraculous days, weeks, and months which are to follow after their first night together, the ifrit will see fit to grant Salim a further five wishes. This is the story of those wishes.





	Salim's Next 5 Wishes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meilan_Firaga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/gifts).



“I wish you could see what I see,” Salim says, blinking back tears.

He smells of the hotel’s complimentary bath wash, floral yet astringent, but his still-damp skin is burnished bronze in the dim, artificial light, and his eyes blaze with incandescent orange fire.

“I do not grant wishes,” the ifrit replies.

“But you do.”

And he did. And he does. In the miraculous days, weeks, and months which are to follow after their first night together, the ifrit will see fit to grant Salim a further five wishes. This is the story of those wishes.

 

*

 

The first time the ifrit grants Salim’s wish is when the ifrit leaves Salim behind.

Before the ifrit, Salim had never made love to another man. Oh yeah, sure, he’s had plenty of experience sucking cock behind buildings, and in shadowed, smelly alleys, and through grimy public restroom gloryholes. That, however, was impersonal: them, using him, and him, shamefully aroused by his own degradation, not even daring to touch himself until afterwards. It had been _profane_.

It was different with the ifrit. There was kissing, caressing, and mutuality. There was shared pleasure. There was respect, reverence: sex as an act of worship. It had felt transporting. _Holy_. A god – a real god! – blessed him with this act of love.

So he didn’t misunderstand when he woke up alone in the hotel room the next morning, and all of his possessions, all of the things which made him “Salim, Omani businessman on a work trip to America,” were missing, and everything belonging to “Ibrahim bin Irem, New York cab driver” had been left behind. He understood what the ifrit had done, understood what the ifrit’s gift was meant to accomplish. The ifrit had given Salim an escape from a life he hated, a life in which he had to pretend he was something he was not and still managed to disappoint everyone around him anyway. He has given Salim a brand new start in America, the legendary land of the self-reinvention.

He could have done it. Salim knows he could have. He could have become Ibrahim bin Irem, New York cab driver. Manhattan is a grid: the avenues run north to south, and the streets run west to east. How hard can it be?   

Except, he didn’t _want_ to become Ibrahim bin Irem, New York cab driver any more than he’d ever wanted to be Salim, Omani businessman. Who did he want to be instead? To be perfectly honest, he didn’t know. He just knew that he needed to find the ifrit – _his_ ifrit – again.

Another, lesser man might have concluded that the ifrit was lost to him forever, that he’d taken Salim’s Omani passport and his return airline ticket and gone to Oman, where there are still grandmothers who believe in the jinn. But Salim knew that he had not. Somehow, he knew that as well. Why was he so certain of that? To be perfectly honest, he didn’t know. He just _knew_.

And yes, so it is. Salim’s faith is rewarded. The ifrit, Salim is told, may be found at the House on the Rock, a roadside attraction in Wisconsin.

A single adult day-ticket for “The Ultimate Experience” at the House on the Rock costs Salim $29.95. He figures this will cover all of his bases, as the Americans like to say, since he’s not sure where in this sprawling complex he will find the ifrit. (He overpaid. As it turns out, he could’ve saved himself the cash and purchased the next cheapest option instead, “The Highlight Experience” for $24.95. This excess consumption, in and of itself, is probably a parable of what it means to be in America. On the other hand, if he’d bought a ticket for “The Original House Experience” only, a comparative bargain at $14.95, he would never have found the gods. That, too, is probably a parable of what it means to be in America.)

Speaking of excess consumption – Salim has never seen so much… _stuff._ The _nouveau riche_ of the Middle East are nothing if not insatiably acquisitive, but this is at a whole other level. Everything is arranged haphazardly, in room after room after room, without explanation. Objects on display are dusty and sporting minor damage. He can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake.

“These aren’t real Tiffany lamps,” Salim overhears a visitor inform her companion as he explores the Original House. “They’re all fakes. They were made by two guys in Illinois.”

“I can’t decide if they’re beautiful or ugly,” her companion says.

“Ha! Maybe they can be both at once. Depending on who you are.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

Salim has heard of Tiffany & Co. before – a famous American luxury brand. His sister loves their jewelry. The so-called fake lamps with their leaded stained glass are everywhere. He studies one at random. He is untrained, but he is, or so he likes to think, reasonably observant and discriminating. The lamp is vaguely mushroom-shaped, and it’s gorgeous. A warm riot of colorful flowers. Clearly hand-crafted. It could quite possibly be one of a kind.

For the first time in a long time, Salim casts his mind back to his businessman’s sample case full of shit. The samples weren’t shit because they were cheap and poorly made, though, yes, they were that too. No, they were shit because they had no purpose. They were utterly meaningless.

Maybe, Salim tells himself, it doesn’t matter whether or not these are real Tiffany lamps at the House on the Rock. Here, in this place, the lamps are beautiful. They inspire wonder.

And maybe, Salim tells himself, a man is measured not by who he _is_ but rather by what it is he _does_. For the first time in his sorry, pathetic little life, Salim knows what he must do. He has a purpose. The ifrit gave him that. Maybe, Salim thinks, a sense of purpose is what he’d been wishing for.

The gods are gathering. Salim has found them. He steps forward.

The ifrit sees him and says his name.

   

*

 

The second time the ifrit grants Salim’s wish is when he allows Salim to accompany him on his errand for Wednesday.

Riding in a motorcycle sidecar is different than riding in a taxi. The road is closer, and it is possible to feel the road’s smoothness, its roughness, its cracks and imperfections with an intimacy that would be unimaginable in a car. The wind is ever-present as well, dry and cutting as it blows, and Salim is grateful for the protection afforded by the crash helmet and the ifrit’s black plastic glasses.

He’s curious about where they’re going, of course, but his curiosity is mainly academic. He’d go to hell and back if he had to, if it meant that he got to stay with the ifrit.

They’re so close to each other all the time when they’re on the road. Sometimes, Salim can hardly believe it, and he takes the ifrit’s hand into his own and squeezes. Solid. _Real_. The ifrit squeezes back. Otherwise, though, he keeps his head straight forward, his gaze fixed on the road.

The ifrit is such a conscientious driver – who would have believed that? Not Salim! Cab drivers have reputations for recklessness behind the wheel, but not even Salim’s _mother_ would be able to find fault with the ifrit’s driving.

And the ifrit wears a helmet too. Salim wonders if gods can die from motorcycle accidents – surely they cannot? Not like mortals such as himself can. Then again, there’s a dead woman out there who didn’t stay dead, and _that_ had something to do with a leprechaun…

They stop at a gas station to refuel.

“Do you need anything?” the ifrit asks. “Water? Food?”

Salim just shrugs, noncommittal. Now that he’s been reunited with the ifrit, nothing else seems to matter –

“Salim? Are you thirsty? Hungry? When did you last eat anything?” the ifrit persists.

You know, he can’t actually remember. Was it at the diner with the other gods after the House on the Rock…? Being shot at had definitely killed whatever hunger he may have been feeling…

The ifrit makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and goes into the gas station shop. He emerges a minute later with a hamburger in a greasy paper wrapper and a can of Coke. “Eat,” he says.

Salim obeys without question. He hadn’t realized quite how hungry and thirsty he’d been!

“Come on. Get in. We still have a long way to go,” the ifrit says.

Once they are on the road again, the miles they have yet to cover spread out before them to the far-distant horizon line and beyond, Salim reflects upon his situation. America is supposed to be about freedom, isn’t it? But what sort of freedom? In New York, the ifrit had freed Salim from the tyranny of his sister and her husband. He had given Salim the freedom to forge his own path in life. But such freedom had turned out to be as much a curse as a blessing without some clear objective, some goal to strive for, in mind.

Fortunately, the ifrit had given him a purpose as well, and by being reunited with the ifrit, Salim had achieved that purpose.

Only on hindsight does he realize how anxious he’d been, how uncertain. He hadn’t even fully admitted this anxiety to himself. But truth be told, being alone is always hard, and to be alone in a country which is not yours, in places you’ve never been, with only yourself and your faith to rely upon, is almost unbearably hard. The lonely nights had been especially painful.

Salim doesn’t hurt anymore. He has someone to take care of him. He has, at least for now, been freed from his anxiety. He realizes he’d been wishing for that, too.

Freedom _to_? Or freedom _from_? Maybe this country believes in a little of both.

He reaches out to take the ifrit’s hand again. The ifrit is always so warm to the touch. Salim squeezes. The ifrit squeezes back.

 

*

 

The third time the ifrit grants Salim’s wish is when he asks the ifrit to tell a story about himself, and he obliges.

They’ve stopped at a Motel 6 for the night. The parking lot is empty when they pull up in the motorcycle, and as best Salim can tell, they are the only guests. The receptionist allocates them to a room on the second floor, accessible via an outdoor staircase. The staircase, along with the balcony it’s linked to, is made entirely out of wrought iron. Even in the darkness, the chipped white paint doesn’t quite manage to conceal the spots of corrosion. Salim winces at how the stairs rattle and shake as he ascends them, the bolts anchoring them to the ground old and loose; he imagines putting his foot straight through one of the steps and tumbling to the pavement below in a rain of rust flakes.

Fortunately, the staircase holds, and so does the balcony, and the room itself is nicer than Salim was expecting. It looks newly redecorated in a hyper-modernist style. The king size bed is neatly made. And if the surfaces are made of laminate, not hardwood, and the seat cushions are pleather instead of leather – everything strategically designed to be easy to wash and/or wipe down with a damp disinfectant cloth – well, Salim doesn’t begrudge any of it.

He and the ifrit don’t _mean_ to be destructive, but sometimes their enthusiasm for each other has gotten the better of their best intentions…and the state of their motel rooms.

Afterwards, they lie side by side on the bed, desires sated for now, hips and shoulders touching, hands casually intertwined. The television is tuned in to some network drama procedural – _Law & Order_, _Criminal Minds_ , or _NCIS_? They all look more or less the same to Salim, and with the sound muted, the flicker of images on the screen might as well be so much wallpaper.

Besides, during peaceful, lazy interludes like this, Salim would rather talk.

“There are always stories told about your kind,” Salim says, broaching an old subject of conversation from a new angle. “The one about the fisherman, for example…I suppose you know that one…?”

The ifrit’s lips twist wryly upwards at that. A jinni trapped in a bottle? Powerful, but not especially bright? Of course he’s heard that one. It’s not a terribly flattering story, not from the ifrit’s point of view.

“And then there’s the one about the Qalandar that an ifrit transforms into an ape…I suppose you know that one, too?”

“Yes, of course,” the ifrit says. That one ends with a magical battle waged between the princess and the ifrit. The princess manages to kill the ifrit, albeit at the cost of her own life. The ifrit is no longer smiling. Again, not the most flattering of depictions of his kind.

“I just…I don’t understand. In those stories, jinn fit into bottles and transform themselves into animals. But I have seen you do none of these things,” Salim says. “You can’t do them…can you?”

“Not as such,” the ifrit says. “And who’d want to live in a bottle? Or a magic lamp?”

It’s a fair point. “So what, then, is true?” Salim asks.

“True? About me?” the ifrit counters. He emits a little bark of laughter. “Which version of the truth would you rather hear? That I was born on a Thursday, under a scorching desert sun, millennia before the coming of the Prophet? Or that I was formed from smokeless fire by Allah, or from the blood of a murder victim? Or that I was born in 1919, when a young woman traveled from Syria across the sea to Paterson, New Jersey to take work in her great uncle’s cousin’s silk factory?”

Salim blinks. One of these is not like the others. He is surprised, and he is surprised that he was surprised. After all that has happened, all that he has seen, since coming to America, he feels like he shouldn’t have been. And yet he is.

“She was raised Muslim, but that was very unusual for Arab immigrants in those days. Most of the other Syrians were Christian. So she was surrounded by her people, but she was also alone.” The ifrit’s voice is unusually soft, distant, like just talking abut the past actually takes him back there.

“But she was a bright young woman, and adaptable, and she knew to emphasize what she had in common with her coworkers and her neighbors. During the meal breaks, when the looms were turned off, and during the evenings when it was too cold for the children to play outside and heat was conserved by cramming as many bodies as possible into the room with the best furnace, she would reminisce about the old country and its stories, and she would reinvent them anew. Everyone who listened to her _believed_. Maryam conjured gods with her voice. She conjured _me_.”

“What happened to her?” Salim asks.

The ifrit shrugs. “She had a long and happy life,” he says. “Married a Polish Catholic man and converted. Gave birth to four children and filled their ears with her stories. Died at 92 years old. Her grandchildren aren’t Muslim. They’re either lapsed Catholics or self-described atheists. Only one continues to live in New Jersey. Layla. She’s a literary agent in the city. The office is in Brooklyn. A passion for good stories is in her blood, I suppose.”

Salim takes a while to digest this information. Objective truth or the subjective truth of memory – which ought to take precedence?

“Have you ever _really_ been to Ubar?” he asks finally.

The ifrit shrugs again. “I remember the Lost City of Towers like I remember your face when it is not directly in front of my eyes. I do not ever remember taking an airplane or boarding an ocean liner. Do you understand?”

“I-I…”

Is the ifrit Arab, or is he American? Salim tries to fathom it. He thinks back on the beautiful leaded stained glass lamps filling the House on the Rock and how he’d concluded that maybe it didn’t matter whether they were real Tiffany lamps or not. Maybe, Salim tells himself, it doesn’t actually matter _what_ the ifrit really is, or if he has really been to Ubar, the Lost City of Towers, or if he only says he has been there because someone, a talented teller of tales named Maryam, perhaps, once told a story about it.

“I think…that…that maybe…” Salim starts.

Salim has wished for understanding. Now he thinks that maybe he’s starting to understand what it means to be an American god.

 

*

 

The fourth time the ifrit grants Salim’s wish is when, for the umpteenth time, someone he has only just met insults their relationship and casts aspersions on their sexuality.

Salim never accepted America’s mythology about itself uncritically. He knew that the country continued to labor beneath the long shadow of its slaveholding past; he knew that Muslims like himself were convenient scapegoats for nativist politicians. He knew that America was not truly The Land of the Free. He knew that it wasn’t _perfect_.

Nevertheless, from afar, America had seemed a paradise in comparison to Oman. Openly gay men on television! Legalized gay marriage!

But instead, Americans Salim meets seem to believe that their much touted freedoms include the freedom to insult him and the ifrit to their faces. Sometimes the insults seem intended as a virtuoso display of cleverness. Other times, they are so colorfully obscene that Salim can feel himself squirming like a hooked fish. Most of the time, though, they are just banal, gross, and casually cruel.

“Faggots,” a middle aged white man mutters as he passes their table. “Go back to Mexico.”

Salim’s jaw actually drops. The man is observant enough to notice that they are holding hands under the table, but he sees their brown complexions and assumes they must be Mexican? Why?! Okay, granted, they’re sitting at a table for two at a Taco Bell and eating, well, _tacos_ …but even if Taco Bell isn’t an authentic Mexican restaurant – whatever “authentic” is supposed to mean – why is a man who thinks faggots should go back to Mexico patronizing a nominally “Mexican” restaurant?

All of a sudden, Salim realizes he’s had enough. They aren’t hurting anyone. They aren’t doing or saying anything sexual. They’re just holding hands because they love each other. Salim is lurching up out of his chair, champing at the bit to do…what? Confront the bigot about his rudeness? The ifrit’s grip on Salim’s hand tightens like a vise, and he shakes his head subtly, once, silently urging Salim to sit back down. Salim comes to his senses. What was he thinking, trying to start a fight? He feels ashamed. The pad of the ifrit’s thumb rubs the back of Salim’s hand soothingly.

They finish their lunch and dispose of their trash in the appropriate waste receptacle. The bigot is sitting alone at a table near the exit. They will have to walk right by him in order to leave the restaurant. Maybe if Salim pretends the bigot isn’t there, he’ll leave them alone…

“Have you ever tried topping before?” the ifrit asks Salim out of the blue.

Salim skids to a halt, shocked beyond words. He hasn’t. He suspects the ifrit already knows that.

“I want you to top me tonight. Would you like to?” the ifrit continues, like he and Salim are the only two people in the world.

“I-I…” Yes, he realizes that he’d like to. He suspects the ifrit already knows that too. A frisson of arousal shivers down his spine.

“Good. I can’t wait. It’s going to feel so great to have you inside me,” the ifrit concludes. Then, as if to underscore the point, he presses a tender but otherwise g-rated kiss to Salim’s lips.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the bigot’s reaction to the ifrit’s words and their kiss. He sits, frozen. He appears shocked; he flushes crimson with rage. Salim offers him a friendly smile and a limp-wristed wave as they take their leave of the Taco Bell.

When they stop for the night – a Days Inn a few hundred feet along some random exit off the motorway – the ifrit makes it abundantly clear to Salim that he meant what he said earlier.

They take things slowly, not because the ifrit needs it but because _Salim_ does. He lies face down on the bed with Salim above him, straddling his hips and pressing himself deeper and deeper inside. It’s tight but not too tight. The ifrit feels as hot as the heart of a star, though, and Salim’s hips judder convulsively. He almost orgasms spontaneously right then and there.

“Move,” the ifrit grunts, turning his head to the side so that he can see Salim heaving for breath and struggling for control behind him. The fire in his eyes seems to burn brighter.

Salim obeys. It feels too good. He can’t not. The first few thrusts strike Salim as awkward, poorly positioned and either too long or too short, and he is starting to feel self-conscious – maybe he isn’t meant to be a top – when the ifrit moans, a sweet, half-broken sound.

“Faster,” the ifrit says.

Salim sucks in his breath and obeys, the speed of his thrusts accelerating. “That good?” he asks.

“Good,” the ifrit says, “but faster.”

Salim digs his toes into the mattress for traction, lays his chest along the muscular length of the ifrit’s back, wraps his arms around the ifrit’s chest, squeezes the ifrit’s legs closed with his thighs, grabs hold of his shoulders, and thrusts faster. Each time he thrusts home, balls crushed against the ifrit’s backside, their flesh connects with a sharp, ringing slap. “That good?” he asks again.

The ifrit just moans. His mouth is open, and his plush lips glisten wetly. Salim kisses him.

He doesn’t remember much after that. There is only the sweat beading his forehead as he pushes, and pushes harder, the delicious friction down below, the damp slide of skin on skin as they move in unison. There is his orgasm and his semen, cooling the ifrit’s fire and spilling out between them where they are joined. There is the ifrit writhing beneath Salim as he pours himself into the mattress, his muscles quivering against Salim’s cheek where he nuzzles him.

“Good?” the ifrit asks afterwards, after he’s caught his breath.

“Yes. Good. The best.” Salim laughs, joyful and free. “Was it good for you too?”

“The best,” the ifrit says.

Salim puffs up with pride. He’s been wishing for this, he realizes – a relationship unbound by stereotyped roles. Never in a million years had he thought he’d ever achieve it.

“So…what do you think?” Salim asks. He’s hardening again. He should be good for another round. He rocks against the ifrit suggestively.

“Do it,” the ifrit says.

 

*

 

The fifth time the ifrit grants Salim’s wish is when the men his brother-in-law hired to bring him home to Oman somehow manage to find him.

He doesn’t know how they do it, but his brother-in-law is a very rich man, and with enough money rich men can make seemingly impossible things that they wish to happen, happen.

They meet Salim and the ifrit on the road and cut off every path of escape.

“You will come with us,” they say.

“No,” Salim says. He’d thought he’d already left that life behind him for good. He does not wish to return to it now. Or ever.

“Don’t try to struggle,” they say. “You won’t like what happens if you try to struggle.”

“No,” Salim repeats.

They grab Salim and pull him bodily out of the sidecar. When Salim tries to pull away, he discovers that he cannot. “No!” he shouts.

“Aren’t you listening? He said no,” the ifrit says as he gets off the motorcycle and approaches them.

But they ignore the ifrit; they treat him like he isn’t even there. That is their first – and last – mistake.

The ifrit removes his black plastic glasses and murmurs words in a language that is older than Classical Arabic. The men his brother-in-law hired burst into flame. They don’t have time to scream before their bodies are reduced to ash. Then the wind comes and blows the ash away like so much dust in the wind.

“Y-you…y-you…” Salim stutters, shocked beyond measure by the ifrit’s demonstration of divine power. For all the time he has seen the fire in the ifrit’s eyes, has _felt_ it fill him from the inside when they make love, he never… _he never…!_

“I did what I must. You did not wish to leave,” the ifirit says and holds Salim while he shakes.

“T-thank y-you. They were going to make me go home,” Salim whispers. He can’t stop shaking.

“No. _This_ is home. You are where you belong,” the ifrit says simply.

With a lurch of his heart, Salim realizes it’s true. Salim belongs with the ifrit, and the ifrit is an _American_ god. This means he is already home…and home is _America_. Eventually, Salim stops shaking.

 

*

 

The sixth time Salim wishes for something, however, the ifrit does not grant it. In fact, he refuses outright.

“Don’t go. You don’t have to fight. Stay with me, please,” he pleads.

Salim is an Omani Muslim man living in the twenty-first century, so of course he understands what it means to take up righteous arms of battle against an evil enemy, what it means to be willing to die for a just cause. Of course he understands martyrdom. What he doesn’t understand is how selfish, untrustworthy Wednesday could be a cause worth dying for.

“I have a contract. I don’t have a choice. I told you,” the ifrit says.

Although he has mentioned this “contract” to Salim before, he has never bothered to explain it, and Salim has never asked. He asks now.

The ifrit is slow to answer. Salim can feel the heat of his narrowed, appraising gaze through the plastic sunglasses he wears. “You wouldn’t understand,” he says at last.

“Try me.”

The ifrit sighs and takes off his sunglasses. “Remember how I told you that the grandmothers came here too?”

“Yes…”

“Well, eventually grandmothers die, and their grandchildren hold to different gods. They do not see burning eyes looking back at them from the sandstorms.” He laughs, humorless and hollow. “Fuck, they’ve never even _seen_ a sandstorm, not even on tv, because they live in fucking Michigan. You tell me you want the truth, Salim? That’s the truth.”

Salim nods mutely. He’s not sure which state Michigan is, and in all of his travels across America, he’s not even sure if he’s ever been there. He doesn’t _think_ he has, but who knows?

“A god without believers to remember him with their worship is no god at all,” he ifrit continues, unsparing and relentless. “He changes with the times, or he dies. There is no afterlife for gods, no Underworld, no Heaven, no Hell. Gods just… _end_. I was on the brink of death. Grimnir saved my life.”

“How…?” Salim croaks. His throat feels suddenly parched and dry. “How did he…?”

“He’s a clever bastard, is Grimnir, and he’s older than most of us. Older than I am. And he’s a survivor. Don’t be fooled by appearances, Salim – Grimnir may look cheap, but he has worship to spare, and he will provide to gods who are in desperate need of it…”

Ah, Salim is starting to see where this is going –

“…for a price.”

“So you owe him,” Salim says. It’s not a question. “But – ”

“Yes,” the ifirit interrupts. “And the price is steep. The price is service.”

Salim persists. “But I still don’t understand. Wednesday is dead. We all saw them kill him. How is it possible to have a contract with a dead god?”

“I told you. Grimnir is a clever bastard, and his contract has a clever, obscure clause: avenge him in the event of his death. Life for life. Death for death.”

“Oh.” The words – and the implication of those words – sink in slowly. Even so, he has to ask. “Is there no way to break the contract?”

“Not without my death.”

And so, Salim does not get his wish. The ifrit will fight on the side of the old gods against the new. He will risk his life, the life that Wednesday gave him, and he might die.

“I’m coming with you,” Salim says.

To his credit, the ifrit does not try to dissuade him.

Salim is only a mere mortal; he cannot see as the gods see. To him, the field of the final battle looks like a bunch of oddly shaped rocks at the top of a hill on the border between Georgia and Tennessee. The gods, both the old gods and new, look like a motley crew of all-American oddballs throwing down over…what, exactly? Who gets to enjoy the most commanding view?

In any case, Salim stays well back from the action, but the gods aren’t interested in him. They act like he isn’t even there. He watches, unmolested, as the ifrit makes short work of a god of microwave ovens who looks like a slightly overcooked 1950s housewife, and despite the ifrit having forbade it in advance, he’s just about to rush in to try to save the ifrit from a god who looks a bit like Kim Kardashian and a bit like her half-sister Kylie – a god of Instagram influence, perhaps? – from being strangled to death when Shadow Moon appears and says some things Salim can’t quite hear. Whatever those things are, they make the gods, both the old gods and the new, just…

…stop. Stop fighting. And walk away.

The god who looks a bit like Kim Kardashian and a bit like her half-sister Kylie releases the ifrit from her death grip and waves at Salim, bejeweled fingers and ruby-lacquered fingernails glinting in the fading afternoon light, as she climbs into a black stretch limousine SUV.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Salim asks the ifrit as he helps him back onto his feet.

The ifrit just shakes his head. “I’m…I’m not sure. But it’s over. Somehow, it’s over.”

Salim feels his eyes filling with relieved, happy tears. If it’s over, he knows, then that means something else can begin. He doesn’t know yet what that something will be, but thank Allah, no, thank every god, thank _all_ the gods, he knows that it will be with him and the ifrit –

Alive and _together_.


End file.
